A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
This week’s call will be at a special time, WEDNESDAY at 1 PM. Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, and subsequent apology, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts: one South African and one Palestinian. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We’ll talk about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create and whether or not they work.
This week’s live Zoom call will be for paid subscribers, as usual. But we will make the video available for everyone.
Cited in Today’s Video
The Trump administration’s agreement with Northwestern University.
At Harvard, Muslim students are more than twice as likely as Jewish students to feel unsafe.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Lee Mordechai chronicles Israel’s “collective amnesia” about the genocide in Gaza.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Ahmed Moor about my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University.
I talked on the Know Your Enemy podcast about the varying Jewish reactions to Zohran Mamdani.
Haaretz profiles Israel’s “Faithful Left.”
Check our Terrell Starr’s excellent Substack newsletter.
The New York Times named Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza one of the 100 notable books of 2025.
I’ll be speaking on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.
Reader Response
I occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal:
“I don’t understand why you felt you made ‘a serious mistake’ by speaking at Tel Aviv University. Virtually all of the humanities lecturers at the university are on the left, as are a good percentage of the students. They are highly critical of the extreme right-wing government policy, and the current Tel Aviv University President Prof. Ariel Porat has defended the right of Arab and left-wing students to protest against the war.
My predecessor as Israeli Co-Editor of Palestine-Israel Journal was Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal. When he was the Co-Director of Tel Aviv University’s Walter Lebach Research Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence, together with Prof. Amal Jamal, a Palestinian-Israel, we arranged for them to host a presentation by Prof. Johan Galtung at the university, who is considered the father of peace research. That earned Bar-Tal the title of “enemy of Israel” from all the right-wing watchdogs. And Galtung himself (who was also on the enemy of Israel lists), who was highly critical of both Israeli and American government policies, had no problem appearing at Tel Aviv U. alongside an appearance we arranged for him at the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Abu-Dis in the West Bank.
You could have found a way to show respect for the BDS movement while at the same explaining that you are critical of any support that any part of the university gives to the IDF. The literature departments definitely don’t supply arms to the IDF, and their curriculum is under attack from the right-wing ministers of education and culture.”
See you on Wednesday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration announced another agreement with an American university—in this case Northwestern University. And it’s really striking if you look at the language that Trump’s Department of Justice uses in describing the terms of this agreement.
So, let me just quote a couple of elements from it. The Justice Department writes that Northwestern University will ‘safeguard its students, employees and faculty from unlawful discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin, including race-based admissions practices and a hostile educational environment directed towards Jewish students.’ And then it goes on that the university will ensure that it ‘does not preference individuals based on race, color, or national origin in admission, scholarships, hiring, or promotion.’ And then it goes on to say that it will ‘implement mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty, and staff.’
So, what do you notice about this language? On the one hand, the Trump administration is boasting that Northwestern is going to treat all students equally, irrespective of race, religion, national origin, etc. And then, literally in the next sentence, it says and it’s also going to do this special thing to protect Jewish students, this special thing to fight against antisemitism. Essentially, what it’s doing is it’s putting the safety and rights of Jewish students in a separate category from the safety and rights of all other students. This is really a disastrous, I think, development actually for Jewish students on campus and for American Jews in general.
The position of American Jewish organization should be that Jewish students on campus should be treated exactly the same as everybody else. And that should be part of a broader strategy and struggle among American Jewish organizations to say that the struggle against antisemitism will be part of a larger struggle against all forms of bigotry.
But that’s not what the Trump administration wants at all, actually, because the Trump administration takes a completely different view about what it calls bigotry towards Jewish students than, let’s say, bigotry towards, let’s say, Muslim students or Black students, right? Because when it comes to Muslim students, the Trump administration doesn’t think bigotry is a problem at all. In fact, the Trump administration is very blatantly practicing bigotry, right? Donald Trump just the other day basically was making fun of Representative Ilhan Omar’s hijab. This is an administration that has said that the only immigrants it wants to come to the United States are white South Africans, that it wants to cut off all third world immigration. It’s an administration that demonizes trans students, right?
So, basically what the administration is doing is creating a two-tier system in which it essentially says that Jewish students should have particular protections, which are different, superior protections for their concerns and their safety than other students, right? Now, perhaps if we lived in a world in which Jewish students were uniquely threatened, there might be some justification for that. But that’s really not the case at all. Yes, Jewish students face antisemitism, of course, right? But actually, given the state-sponsored bigotry against Muslims, against Black people, against trans people, they are actually at greater risk than Jewish students.
And the data from college campuses actually, you know, bear this out. When Harvard University created an antisemitism task force and an Islamic phobia task force, they simply asked Muslim and Jewish students at Harvard whether they felt unsafe. And they found that while only 26% of Jewish students said they felt unsafe, fifty-six percent—more than twice as high a percentage—of Muslim students said they felt unsafe. So, there’s no logical empirical basis whatsoever for basically suggesting that there’s a kind of crisis around the treatment of Jewish students and that you’re going to therefore treat them in a fundamentally different way than you treat other groups of students.
What the Trump administration is really doing is creating a two-tier system in which it creates a kind of Jewish supremacy on college campuses because the rights of Jewish students are considered more important than the rights of other students. This is, in a way, a kind of importing of the Israeli model of what makes Jews safe, as opposed to the traditional American model, which comes out of the American Jewish role in the Civil Rights Movement, which argues that the safety of American Jews comes from arguing for equality under the law and fighting against bigotry for all groups.
But you have elements in the organized American Jewish community, which is essentially allied with the Trump administration’s strategy. This is not just terrible for all of those other groups that have the rights and concerns of their students not being centered, right? But it also is very, very bad for Jewish students. It’s very bad for Jewish students to be singled out in this way. That in a weird way, the claim that Jewish students deserve certain kind of superior protections is actually very much the flip side of this rising antisemitism, particularly on the right, which sees the idea that Jews have certain special protections or special influence, power as they see it in the United States, and actually, that fuels their hostility to Jews.
This Trump administration effort is actually very, very dangerous, I think, for Jewish students as well as all other students. And it should be rejected by American Jewish leaders who should make it very clear that they don’t want special privileges for Jewish students, they want the same standard for Jewish students and all others. That would mean actually rejecting what the Trump administration is trying to do at places like Northwestern.
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